DCHP-2

bureau DCHP-2 (August 2016)

• 1 n. — mostly Quebec, somewhat dated

  a dresser, a chest of drawers where clothing is kept.

  Type: 2. Preservation — Use of this meaning is today largely restricted to Quebec, where only Anglophones whose parents were born and raised in the province use it as a majority term (Chambers & Heisler 1999: Figure 9, shown in Chart 1 in the version of Chambers 2000). Chart 1 shows this quite clearly for Quebec City Anglophones. Bureau is preferred over "dresser" more than 50% of the time only for those who score a "Regionality Index" of 1, i.e. they were born and raised in Quebec City, they still live there and their parents were also born and raised there. The form is a minor variant for all other speakers, even those born and raised in the city but whose parents were from elsewhere, even other Quebec cities (these speakers would have a "Regionality Index" of 2 or 3).
  COD-2 labels the term simply as "N Amer." for a "a chest of drawers", which is no longer the case as Chambers' data suggests.

  • Ancedotal evidence suggests that the term in this meaning among Ontario retirees and, doubtless, in other Canadian regions this minority meaning also still exists.

• 2 † n., plural: bureaux — obsolete

  a writing desk with drawers.

  The term is no longer in general use to refer to a desk except for particular types of antique furniture (see the 1992 and 1999 quotations). The OED-3's first quotation for 'writing desk' is from 1741, while the meaning of 'chest of drawers', which is marked as American, is first attested in a quotation from 1819. However, often the context give for the quotations does not distinguish clearly which piece of furniture is meant.
  The term bureau in this sense is a borrowing from French. Canadians may be more likely to use bureau to mean desk because of English-French bilingualism, but this tendency would be difficult to distinguish from a preservation of the British use of the word.
  See W-3, s.v. "bureau" (1a), which marked the term as "Brit", AHD-5, s.v. "bureau" (2), which is marked "Chiefly British". COD-2 labels this meaning as "Cdn & Brit.", for which we find little evidence. OED-3 labels the meaning as "Uncommon in North American usage, owing to the predominance of sense 4 [i.e. 'chest of drawers']. This statement, while correct during the editing of OED-1 [1884 to 1933] no longer fits the facts offered under meaning 1.